Field
This disclosure is generally related to the distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to channel discovery and authentication based on a name-based message-exchange.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content-centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending “interest” packets for various content items and receiving “content object” packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable-length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level.
A CCN node typically does not accept unsolicited messages in order to prevent potential attacks and minimize their impact. However, in a CCN network, all nodes may not be coordinated to establish communication channels among themselves for message exchanges. As a result, a forwarder of a node can receive a message via a remote interface (i.e., the interface of a remote node in the CCN network) that has not been configured with a channel. Since the remote interface is “unknown” to the forwarder, it drops the received message. This can lead to a forwarder dropping a valid message from a peer node.